To ask if you’ve ever become obsessed with a murder case?

[sheknoedidhitit]

I was watching a true crime podcast on YouTube and it finished and went to a random suggestion and it was a 2 minute video of a crime scene inside a subway from the 80s on an ordinary news channel.

I looked into the case and there’s nothing on it apart from a one column blurb in the newspaper at the time and the victims photo being sold on Amazon. It’s so weird .. and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Anyone else?

Essex Police arrested Barrymore's ex-boyfriend in 2021 and later submitted a file to CPS.

Nothing appears to have come about as a result of this, so it seems CPS appear to believe either a prosecution is unlikely to result in a conviction, or it isn't in public interest to prosecute.

It would seem Essex police are content that they know what happened and who was responsible though.

I have been v upset about Nicola furlong, but so little information and weird treatment of perpetrator.

Yes, it is enjoyable actually, and whether or not anyone pores over anything doesn't materially affect or alter the original crime, the victims, or anything that happened subsequently either.

You might find it "grim", I just see it as curiosity about people who are outliers.

the disappearance of Lars Mittank is a very strange one….

Thank you for reminding me of the horrific murder of Nicola Furlong in Japan
Her murderer is now free as is his friend who was imprisoned for the sexual assault of her friend.

So sad, just a beautiful clever girl with so much ahead. All gone for nothing.

I was interested in the Railway murders for a while. Two men who stalked and murdered innocent women around London and the South east in the 80s.
Their movements were so random , there didn’t seem to be a particular area, that they targeted. Really dangerous men, thankfully both were eventually caught.

You've put it into words what I was thinking, and I would also add that reading these articles and keeping up with what's happened isn't a form of entertainment, its a form of protection,
Because you know how these are just everyday people and so these horrible things could happen to anyone, and so maybe knowledge is a way to keep yourself safe.

One that I always remember is the murder of Sally Gleeson. She was out with friends on nye 2004 and was abducted and murdered. She text her friends asking for help, but as it was nye the networks were overloaded and they weren't delivered for hours. She had a twin sister. The thought of being picked up by the wrong person and texting for help that never came, and how awful her friends must have felt when those messages did come through. Awful.

There's a good documentary type thing on YouTube about these two (true lives channel). It's really interesting as it shows how these two first met, and their personalities came together to become the monsters that they were. It's a good watch.

I get completely obsessed with murder cases and go down rabbit hole . These are the most interesting ones I’ve read about :
The murder of Emmett Till
Jeffrey Dahmer
Chris Watts
Jonbenet Ramsey
Derrick Robie

I've wondered if the canal pusher was real or not.

There's a lot of deaths.

Oh yes. That reminds me of the smiley face killer theory. I was obsessed with that for awhile. They are similar, though with smiley face there were additional oddities such as the fact that some of the alleged victims did not die from drowning and no cause of death could be determined. Some were also were found weeks and even months after they disappeared, but the time of death was established to have been much more recent. However, deaths with the same pattern happened in a number of different cities, so it seems unlikely to be a single killer. Some people were theorizing that it was a group of sickos who possibly met up on the dark web to brag about their kills.

As for the pusher, lots of cities around the world have canals without nearly the record of drownings as Manchester, so I tend to think there may be something to it.
I've talked to several people who were convinced they narrowly escaped death at the hands of smiley face killers and another who says he escaped the canal pusher. The police wouldn't listen to them.
It always struck me as odd how adamant the authorities were that those could not have been murders. Based on some of the evidence, a number of the cases probably were, but they still denied it. I feel bad for the relatives of those people, as they will never know. Imagine having a mystery like that haunting you for the rest of your life and the police won't even look into it.

Did anyone watch the Jonbenet Ramsey programme? Think I've lost faith in channel 5 docs-I realised as soon as they questioned Lucy Letby's guilt in one of them that their fact checking isn't up to much. The Ramsey one seemed to focus on the intruder theory, which no one who has followed the case in any depth really believes anymore. They kept going on about unknown male DNA and I thought it was already proved to be just DNA from the manufacturer of the clothes?

I'm obsessed with loads of true crime! Sometimes when I feel really stressed or anxious, I choose a random case and write a whole article about it from start to finish (or as finished as it is so far).

It always bothers me when I read about a true crime case and can just get snippets from outdated news articles or posts, so I write my own complete one. I know that's very weird. The process of researching it and writing it out really relaxes me, and delving into the depths of the human mind and how low people can go/how normal people can do evil things in the right circumstances/how easy it can be and how small the trigger for these things to happen, it fascinates me, and it makes me feel that whatever is bothering me right now is fairly small.

Some cases that I've done recently which really interested me:

1. The murder of Catherine Carroll - young guy called Brian (19/20 years old) got high and drunk at a NYE party and murdered his friend Greg's mum after breaking into her house when she was sleeping. Poor Greg not only faced the trauma of finding his mum's body but was also convicted of and imprisoned for the crime.
2. The Boston Strangler! Absolutely fascinating. I can't figure out what I think! Was there one serial killer? Was there an original killer and some copycats? Were they just all unrelated cases? And who was/were the killers? I was so sure that Albert DeSalvo wasn't guilty and had been lying/covering for someone else, but then his DNA was found on the final victim years later. It's all so odd.
3. The Geylang Bahru murders. A mum and dad leave the house at 6:00 a.m. every day to run their business as school bus drivers, phoning their children on the home phone to wake them up for school each day. One day, the mum makes the phone call to wake up her children and there's no answer. When she gets home, she finds the 4 children stabbed to death and piled up on one another in the bathroom. No witnesses, nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything weird, despite the fact that it was a very busy and crowded apartment complex where everyone knew everyone. To this day the case hasn't been solved.
4. The murder of Deanna Lynn Bowdoin. Such a sad case on so many levels. Deanna sounds so wonderful and was so loved. She had her whole life ahead of her, but was brutally raped and murdered in her own home. Another heartbreaking aspect of the case is to read about her murderer, who had been failed over and over again by everyone in his life - his family, the authorities, medical professionals. Had just one person tried to help him, Deanna would probably still be alive today. Killer ended up spending years in solitary confinement while completely blind and extremely mentally ill. Died not even understanding why.
5. The Bellevue murders. Two 17-year-old boys who were fascinated by murder and planned to commit their own. All their friends thought they were all talk. One friend of theirs, Kimberley, went to the park with them one evening and they killed her. They then panicked, realising that she'd probably told her family she was meeting up with them that night. So they broke into her family's home and killed all of them too.

The whole story is crazy and awful. It's more interesting because of the killers. One of the killers flat out denied he did it for years. This guy seems to have been the leader, the one whose idea it all was. He refused to accept any responsibility and seemed to genuinely consider himself an innocent victim. The other killer admitted everything and seems vaguely intrigued by the whole thing. Like... "Yeah, I did it, but I have no idea WHY. It was so weird. I can't really believe I did it." He's not really sorry or anything. He doesn't seem to feel bad and he hasn't apologised to the family or friends of his victims. He's just more like ... I killed 4 people for no reason. Huh. So weird. I wonder why I did that.

I could probably go on but this has already turned into a bit of a weird essay.

Yes I watched it ,
What is the general consensus of what happened?

I think most come to the conclusion that her brother Burke did it and the parents covered it up. Badly.

What is the podcast called please?

It’s one that fascinates me. I think ones that fascinate me are because there’s so many reasons why they could be guilty or innocent. Sheila was disturbed. But could the gun fit under her to shoot herself. To get someone to stand lay down while you shoot them twice under the neck is also hard to believe. But then bamber was money orientated and you could see a motive. Also you’d think Sheila would have been overpowered with her being tiny. Yet how did an intruder get in. They suggested Jeremy came through a window. So many unanswered questions.

I watched a few times murder in the valleys documentary. Still cannot decide who did that. The Clydach murders. It was like a storyline from a film.

The Ripper murders had a profound effect on me, growing up. It became VERY close to home when one of the murders happened where my Mum walked our dog every day & the police declared that "no woman was safe". I don't think if you didn't live through that, you can understand how terrifying it was...such a dark time!
There was a murder of a young model, called Sally Ann Bowman & the brutality of that was horrific, She had been dropped off in the early hours by her boyfriend & was yards from her door. I remember she'd been bitten, raped & stabbed to death. The family uses to appear on TV a lot appealing for information & she was so loved & they were so broken, it was heartbreaking. Mark Dixie, the guy who did it...his defense was he found her dead & had sex with her body. Unbelievable!!!
Nothing has ever affected me like the Madeleine McCann case...I have twin daughters, who were a similar age & I used to cry every time I thought about it & just prayed that they found her.

I remember that (re Ripper) so clearly - 'No Woman is Now Safe' plastered across the front pages of all the papers. I was about 10-11 at the time and it was such a frightening thing to read. It does also remind me though of that awful distinction the police seemed to make at the time between prostitute and non-prostitute victims, in hindsight the deaths of those poor sex workers definitely weren't taken as seriously. Such misogyny.

That it had to be one of the family. There wasn't any evidence of an intruder and the mother Patsy wrote the ransom note according to handwriting experts. So as a PP said, the current theory seems to point towards it being the brother and the parents covering it up.

I hope you get some answers and that helps you get closure and some peace, if possible. I guess that shows how after committing these horrific crimes, we see fit to release these monsters to do further harm. I saw he did 7 years for that crime. Seven years. It’s insulting and I’m sure you feel that deeply. Again, really hope you get answers x

It's not a murder I'm obsessed with ( the title of this thread "To ask if you've ever become obsessed with a murder case ?" ) but I think about is The Kerry Baby case, where a newborn baby boy was found stabbed to death on a beach near Caherciveen in Co. Kerry, Ireland in 1984.

28 stab wounds were inflicted on the little baby boy, who was given the name John.

A woman and her family were falsely implicated in the murder in the most farcical way and subsequently received an apology and financial compensation from the State.

In 2021 the baby's body was exhumed and people in the area had voluntarily given DNA to the Gardai (Irish police force ) in the reopened investigation.
In 2023 a man in his 60s and a woman in her 50s, married and living in the area were arrested as DNA proved they were the parents of the baby.
A family member had given their DNA to the police and it led back to the couple.

The couple were subsequently released from custody.

I too hope you get answers and get some kind of closure and can make peace with what happened in your life @Boiledbeetle